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i . April is the cruellest month, breeding/Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing/Memory and desire
It’s spring when they meet. It’s paper-thin wind and a reedy cold kind of spring. A blood orange sunset and the crack of teeth breaking apple skin kind of spring. Marlene stands at the windows of the university art building, exhibition hall wide open and splattered with paintings, waiting for Sirius to arrive from his afternoon lecture. She’s downed two chardonnays and her teeth feel dry. It’s her second year of university and she clings to Sirius and his friends that are her friends now because at this age it feels like anything can slip from her grasp.
She’s working on her third chardonnay by the time Sirius makes it through the doors, windswept and pink-cheeked, obviously off the back of a heated semi-public grope with Remus.
He steals her wine and finishes it, dropping the glass on a rickety plastic high table. He scrapes his hair from his forehead and asks, “Have you met Dorcas?”
“Dorcas?”
Sirius nods his head towards someone behind Marlene and she twists around, neck cracking, to see a girl with deep umber skin, long braids, and a smile that crinkles her eyes.
She turns back to Sirius. “Dorcas.”
Sirius nods. “Dorcas.”
“Oh god.”
Sirius grins, and he’s stupid pretty and the first person to know her as the girl she’s always wanted to be and she loves him like it’ll kill her but she is going to wring his pretty neck.
“I’ll introduce you. She’s in a couple of my art classes,” he says and Marlene cups her jaw with her hand and inhales sharp and quick.
“Why have you never introduced us?” Marlene hisses as they walk towards Dorcas.
The sun is sitting low on the horizon, an egg yolk above the brick and sandstone buildings. It spills into the hall and lights Dorcas in orange and yellow, and she looks like a god, like Aphrodite or an angel, and Marlene’s eyes keep catching on the hook and drop of Dorcas’s collarbone and shoulder even from across the room.
Sirius sighs, “I’ve been working a long game. It’s a slow build friendship, Marls. Not everyone is as desperate as you were for friends –“
“If you want to talk desperate,” Marlene mutters as they approach, “we can talk about the period last year where you were trying to get Remus to text you back.”
Sirius glares at her and elbows her in the ribs. She hunches over, dull pain blooming in her side, and he mutters back, “You know I’m still sensitive about that.”
Marlene laughs, leaning into Sirius, and Sirius laughs too with their elbows knocking and feet kicking at each other as they walk.
“Dorcas!” Sirius calls out when they’re close. Dorcas looks up and grins and it’s like the moment right after jumping off a cliff, like the minutes after swallowing a white powder pill. It’s her heart knocking out of her chest and anticipation baring its teeth like a drug in her veins. She sees a pretty girl and thinks it might be destiny. She pulls at the ends of her hair and clears her throat.
She finds herself grinning back.
“Sirius!” Dorcas exclaims. “You made it!”
Sirius pulls her into a hug and kisses her cheek. “Of course. Couldn’t miss it. I just got here so we haven’t looked around yet. Where are your paintings?”
Dorcas points to a corner to their right. “I expect a full review. Double spaced in twelve point font and a five star rating system. And if you criticise any of it I’ll cry, so keep that in mind.”
Sirius nods, “Of course, effusive praise only. I’ll have it to you by Monday.” He nudges Marlene. “By the way, this is my housemate, Marlene.”
Dorcas looks to her, head tilting and a braid falling over the exposed slope of her shoulder. “Nice to meet you,” she smiles and pulls Marlene in for a hug with one arm. It’s brief, their chests pressing together for a split knuckle second. Dorcas’s hip settles at Marlene’s abdomen, warm for a bared moment, and Marlene’s nose brushes Dorcas’s cheek. She smells like freesia and smoke and vanilla. It hits Marlene at her navel, makes everything warm and slow and overwhelming. How a room gets in summer, windows closed, soupy and air that you can smear your fingers through.
“You too,” Marlene says as they pull away.
Another classmate quickly distracts Sirius from their conversation and Dorcas’s crooked eye-tooth quickly hooks into all of Marlene’s thoughts. She shoves her hands in her pockets.
And then Marlene says, “Sirius has to say housemate when he introduces me because our friendship is constantly in a very precarious balance as he sheds that long hair in the shower and also forgets to wash the sink after he shaves what he likes to call a beard.”
Dorcas throws her head back and laughs. Marlene watches the way her throat moves, the midnight highway stretch of her neck. “Sounds like you’ve got a dog rather than a housemate,” Dorcas observes.
Marlene rolls her eyes and looks at Sirius gesturing wildly to a group of people. “Then he’d be man’s best friend and I’m not sure about that, personally. Although, if we’re viewing him as a dog… have you seen him with his boyfriend?”
Dorcas laughs again, loud and unapologetic, and Marlene wants to keep the sound cupped in her palm, wants to swallow it whole. Her heart is pounding. It makes her chest ache.
“Yes, yeah, I have,” she says. And then, “I saw you standing at the front of the room for, like, twenty minutes earlier.”
Marlene blushes, looks down and up to Dorcas watching her with a little half smile and soft, soft eyes. “I can’t go anywhere new without Sirius, it’s a problem,” she jokes. Dorcas frowns and Marlene keeps going, holding her hands out, “I’m kidding! No, I’m just studying history and gender studies. I don’t really know much about art.”
Dorcas smiles and raises her brows. “I’ve always believed you don’t have to know anything about art to enjoy it. To feel it, you know? And that’s the whole point of art, really. To make people feel something.”
Marlene is nodding and she’s a bit in awe because Dorcas is a dream, something that Marlene would cook up in her subconscious when she was fifteen and thinking about girls and trying not to think about them. Dorcas is beautiful, the heart-stopping kind of beautiful, and Marlene is tripping over her own mouth to make her smile, to make her laugh. They’ve known each other for five minutes and Marlene is thinking about her full bottom lip, the way the corners of her mouth curl up constantly. Her mouth is for smiling and Marlene is thinking about how that smile would taste on her tongue.
“I’ll – I will let you know how I feel, then. Looking at your art. I’m sure I’ll feel – you know, lots.”
Dorcas nods, lips straining against a grin. “Of course. Please let me know.”
Marlene sways on her feet and nods twice, dizzy, frantic. “Of course. Yep.”
“Well, go on. Twelve point font remember!” Dorcas reminds as Marlene takes a step towards the corner.
Marlene laughs and turns, grabbing Sirius by the elbow as she passes him, dragging him towards the paintings.
“Did you kiss?” Sirius asks right at Marlene’s ear.
She scoffs and bats his face away. “Mind your business, you little twink.”
“I’m not a twink,” he retorts, huffing. “We’ve been over this.”
“I don’t care,” she replies, gazing at the disjointed paintings and drawings as they pass.
They stop in front of one of Dorcas’s paintings. It’s bright and loud, aggressive in its paintbrush strokes. It depicts a school, teenagers in scruffy uniforms standing about on the concrete. It’s harsh, realistic and not. Colours that clash and fingers that reach too far across the canvas. Marlene has this feeling in her chest, overflowing. It crawls up her throat and rips its nails across the back of her tongue. She breathes and breathes and breathes and her cheeks itch and she keeps staring and staring and staring. It’s a film-reel flashback of high school memories, a cracked nutshell recollection: golden girl and the long blonde hair, a handsome boyfriend and a pretty pack of pink lip-gloss girl friends.
Marlene turns to Sirius. He looks at her. Rolls his lips together with this strain by his eyes. “High school fucking sucked,” he sighs.
She shakes her head. “It really fucking did.”
They make their way through the space, looking at average student art and rather exceptional student art. Marlene’s eyes keep drifting back to that first one of Dorcas’s. And then Marlene lets her eyes drift back to Dorcas and the hinge of her jaw gets sore and she’s the dusty back of the shelf, the forgotten corner of the party. Dorcas is wrapped up in some jock-type guy’s arms, pulled close with hunched shoulders. Pictured: A boyfriend enfolding his girlfriend, possessive. Marlene picks at her nails.
She has always wanted so bad it makes her fingers ache, splits her nails and rips the skin from her thumbs. She is web-weaved wanting carefully concealed so she doesn’t even have to feel it anymore.
“Fuck,” Sirius mutters. “I didn’t realise she had a boyfriend.”
Marlene shrugs and flicks her gaze from Dorcas to Sirius to the windows where it’s dark with a messy stretch of pink on the horizon as night pulls in around the town.
“It doesn’t matter.”
Sirius says, “She’s definitely queer though. She just didn’t mention anyone so I assumed she was single.”
Marlene shrugs and brushes back the hair sweeping across her eyebrows. “Doesn’t matter.”
“Well,” Sirius sighs, circling fingers around her wrist, “want to go drink James’s wine back at the flat?”
Marlene rolls her eyes and smiles and agrees, “Obviously. Of course.”
Sirius drapes over her shoulders from behind, pushing them towards the door. They don’t bother saying goodbye.
///
ii. Like thickened wine: summer’s blood was in it/Leaving stains upon the tongue and lust for/ Picking
They all stay in the city for the summer. They drink wine in their flats and in parks and get silly and loving in the twist of summer afternoon bleeding its way into evening. Marlene works at a coffee shop and helps James get a job with her. They dance to Springsteen and Bowie and an obscene amount of Britpop in Marlene and James and Sirius’s flat and it’s like youth, it’s hot nights and ice cubes in a sweating glass and the clasp of hands as she spins and spins beneath Lily’s arm. It’s getting older and still feeling like children.
And Dorcas sweeps into their little group with that smile and that laugh that makes mincemeat out of Marlene’s insides. And Dorcas’s boyfriend, Jake, joins them and leaves them when Dorcas grows bored and restless and Marlene prays that she won’t get bored of them, of her, too.
They’re in a park, a rose garden beaming pink and red and white around them. A picnic blanket lays rumpled beneath them and Marlene lies on her stomach, reading, while Dorcas hunches over a sketchbook with pencils and tiny paintbrushes cluttered around. Paint smears over Dorcas’s hands, along the thumb joint and the lines of her palms. A swipe of white sits below Dorcas’s ear looking like a lightning bolt, jagged at one end and blocky at the other. Marlene imagines placing her mouth to the mark, scraping her teeth down and down her neck and maybe Dorcas’s breathing grows harder and maybe she whispers out a noise, not quite a moan, and Marlene makes a blessing out of the v of her throat.
Marlene blinks and pulls her eyes back to her book.
The sun flares out across her skin and sweat makes her t-shirt stick to her back. She flips onto her back, almost feverish, wanting. And then looks up from Didion and says, “You know,” she lets her smile grow as she tilts her head to watch Dorcas cock a brow and purse her lips in waiting, “you should paint me.”
Her cheek is by Dorcas’s knee. She lets herself knock into it briefly, fondly. Dorcas grins that pomegranate heart grin and says without looking up from her sketchbook, “What do you think I’ve been painting?”
“Me?” Marlene questions and props up on her elbows, glancing down at the page to see faint lines and snatches of pale pink and white paint, butter yellow and the ruby of the picnic blanket. “Really?”
Dorcas leans forward, getting in Marlene’s space, making her breath catch and her stomach drop and the backs of her knees sweat. She croons, “Well, you’re just so pretty.”
“Shut up.”
Dorcas rolls her eyes playfully, leaning back. She shrugs and gazes out at the park, down the sloping hill to the field lined with willows. “What else would I paint?”
Marlene sits up, curling her knees to her chest. She touches her palm to her flushed cheek. She can’t look at Dorcas. “Shut up,” she says again.
“You can’t take a compliment at all.” Dorcas grabs her by the shoulders and rocks her back and forth. “Come on, take the compliment.”
Marlene groans out a laugh. “Never, absolutely never. I can’t do it.”
“But you’re so pretty,” Dorcas sighs. She rests her forearms on Marlene’s shoulders and regards her, lip pulled between her teeth. It’s obscene, the way the flesh dips beneath her teeth, the way her tongue swipes at the skin once she’s released her bottom lip. Dorcas’s lips and eyes drive Marlene to distraction, always. The slight downturn of her lids and the smudge of eyeliner, the curve of her lips around a smile, they’re honey-sweet and honey-thick in Marlene’s mouth.
She thinks about the way Dorcas would taste. She thinks about it at night in her bed and walking to class and beneath the shade of ash trees and right now with Dorcas’s sun-warm forearms against her shoulders. She could turn and kiss the inside of her elbow.
Instead of Marlene doing anything reckless, Dorcas says, tender, “You’re infuriating.”
Marlene allows herself to curl one hand beneath the weight of Dorcas’s braids, resting against her neck. Her nape is damp with sweat. “Sorry,” she replies.
“Shut up,” Dorcas laughs.
Marlene laughs too and their laughter weaves its way around each other, mingles in the golden August afternoon with the sun splitting itself over the treetops. She could drink this sound down; swallow it in the morning with her tea and at night with ice clinking in her gin. She wants to consume it, let herself be consumed. She wants, wants Dorcas’s hands on her so badly that her skin aches with it. Feels feverish and tender.
Inhaling a sharp breath, she removes her hand from Dorcas’s neck, falling back so Dorcas’s arms slip from her shoulders. Marlene looks up at the cloudless blue sky and presses a hand to her stomach. It expands with her breath.
“Do you ever miss Jake?” she asks, fingers playing with the ragged edge of her shorn shirt.
“Jake?” Dorcas repeats. She makes a noise in the back of throat. “No. Why?”
Marlene rolls her head to the side so she can see Dorcas with her knees pulled up and elbows propped on the bone, chin in her hand. She’s twirling and tugging at one braid by her ear, watching. “I don’t know,” murmurs Marlene, “you broke up like… two months ago? One month? It hasn’t been long.”
Dorcas wrinkles her nose, eyes drifting skywards. The ash tree they’re sitting near cast shadows on the smooth skin of her forehead and cheeks with flashes of sunlight in delicate diamonds, these little jewels of light across her skin. “I don’t really remember. That’s probably telling.”
Marlene laughs a little, hands following the movement of her belly, the stuttered exchange of air. “Probably.” She squeezes her eyes shut until starbursts wheel in her vision. Opens them to the sun-bright park, vision hazy like a dream. “He was a bit of a prick anyway,” she says, “and I think Sirius and James scared him.”
Dorcas cackles. It’s an ugly sound. Marlene smiles. She loves it. “You scared him a little. You put on your tough butch dyke thing.”
“Tough butch dyke thing?” she laughs, sitting up as a blush crawls up her neck. “What does that even mean? I did not!”
Dorcas is shaking her head, laughing quietly. “You did. You wore your black jeans and your big shirts and you would just kind of stare at him when he talked.”
“That’s because he said the dumbest shit I’ve ever heard,” Marlene retorts, sticking her chin up.
“Yeah,” says Dorcas, “he was a bit of a jock.”
Marlene snorts. “A bit. He couldn’t keep up with you.”
“Yeah,” she sighs. A strained expression passes across Dorcas’s face, lines drawing tight around her mouth and eyes. She looks down at her feet, surrounded by paintbrushes and pencils. “I don’t know. It’s just - it was nice but I don’t think I liked him like I thought I did.” She lets out a long breath, shoulders sinking. Marlene’s chest aches. She wants to reach out and hold Dorcas’s hand, cup her fingers between her palms and kiss the calloused knuckles. A whisper of the devotion Marlene keeps careful and safe behind the cage of her ribs: i’myours i’myours i’myours if you want me. Dorcas shrugs, says, “Anyway, onto better things.”
Marlene swipes a palm over her mouth and pleads a smile to her lips. “Women?” she asks, maybe smirking, trying.
Dorcas laughs. She’s always laughing with her head thrown back and her eyes scrunched up. She’ll throw her head back and it’ll sound different every time - barking and short or wind-chime pretty - and Marlene folds each one beneath her tongue, keeps it there like a pill or maybe just a mint, something to fix some part of her at least.
“Please,” groans Dorcas, “I can’t bring straight men around our group.” She directs a pointed look at Marlene. “Around you.”
Marlene fakes gagging and Dorcas cackles again, and it dispels anything serious from the conversation. Their shoulders loosen, limbs settling against the blanket. In a fractured second, Dorcas leans forward, so close to Marlene’s face she would barely have to try to kiss her. It sets Marlene on fire and makes soup of her insides, makes desperation and wanting rattle at the doorways of her. They both still, noses almost touching, and Dorcas’s breath presses a kiss to Marlene’s mouth so she sits back, scrabbling for her book. Out of the corner of her eye, she sees Dorcas grab the pencil that was beside her planted hand at Marlene’s hip.
She releases a heavy breath and prays desire isn’t a fever across her face. That Dorcas didn’t see how badly she wants.
It’s far too much for anyone.
///
iii. and autumn comes when you’re not yet done/ with the summer passing by
Autumn of third year: the bone crack of almost winter curling around their exposed wrists. It bites at their knuckles and makes Dorcas’s elbows dry and Marlene’s lips. They trade heavy shea butter moisturiser and beeswax lip balm, palm to palm between classes like a secret. Marlene rubs her lips together, smears the thick coat of wax that tastes like honey and feels like a kiss, and thinks of Dorcas all day long.
“I think I drank too many margaritas,” Marlene groans, closing her eyes as she rests her head against the back of the couch.
Dorcas laughs gently in the quiet of the flat and the cushion beside Marlene dips with her weight. Marlene cracks her eyes open to find Dorcas leaning back, head lolling towards her, eyelids heavy. Her eyelashes are obscenely long, dark, dark, with a tiny smudge of eyeliner at the edges of her eyes, winging out. It’s smudged even more than usual from the night of drinking with everyone in the flat. Marlene thinks about licking her thumb and placing it to the sweet soft corner of Dorcas’s eye, wiping it away. Marlene’s thumb then bearing the smudge, a tiny offering of Dorcas etched onto her skin.
She doesn’t. Her body is warm, despite the rap of cold on the windowpanes, like she is beneath the stream of hot summer rain or otherwise the whip-hot wind of a heatwave; she is submerged. She can never quite breathe properly with Dorcas around. Their knees brush as their legs hook over the couch edge, feet brushing the carpet James picked up from the side of the road and only deep cleaned upon Marlene’s insistence.
They’re still looking at each other and Dorcas’s mouth is doing that smile, curled, two fingers slipped into belt loops.
Marlene swipes her thumb along the edge of Dorcas’s eye, collecting the smudged charcoal. Dorcas’s smile grows and she catches Marlene’s hand as it falls back to her lap, lacing their fingers together atop Marlene’s thighs. Dorcas’s thumb skims the inside of her thigh over denim. She wants she wants she wants to move Dorcas’s hand higher and press it between her thighs, pull Dorcas in and let their lips touch. It doesn’t even have to be a full kiss. She would take the suggestion of a kiss, the ghost of one, the memory of one. From Dorcas, she would take anything and beg for more, knowing girls like Marlene are born wanting and are never allowed girls like Dorcas.
Marlene is warm. Submerged. She fell in love with Dorcas so quickly every day now feels like remembering, like coming home.
Girls like Marlene are born wanting.
She squeezes Dorcas’s hand once and lets go, stretching her arms above her head, shoulders popping. She lets out a long groan, cracks her neck side to side. Pats Dorcas’s discarded hand once and rises off the couch.
For a moment, Dorcas stays seated, shoulders curling forwards and mouth pulling down. She watches Marlene with a dark flush, oversized shirt pulled to the side and exposing the sweep of her neck, her collarbone. And then she rises, bumps her hip against Marlene, and walks down the hall.
“Do you still have that toothbrush from last time?” she calls over her shoulder.
Marlene wanders down the hall, dragging her heels along the wood. “Kept especially for you,” she says, stopping in the doorway of her room. Crosses her arms at the implications burned in those words.
“Why thank you,” Dorcas murmurs. She stumbles out of her trousers and kicks them to the opposite side of the room beneath Marlene’s desk. The shirt falls to mid thigh, skims the men’s briefs she always wears. Her legs are toned, long. There’s a dip of muscle on either side of her thighs. Marlene keeps stumbling over the edge of her shirt, the slip of skin it brushes as her briefs ride up.
Marlene turns away and kicks off her jeans, exchanges her shirt for a jumper and throws a hoodie at Dorcas. They both avert their eyes as they remove their bras through their sleeves.
In the bathroom, Marlene hands Dorcas her toothbrush (she bought a toothbrush for Dorcas after the first time she stayed over. she lives further out of town than the rest of them. when it’s late she stays at their flat. with marlene. marlene bought her a toothbrush and she’s used it six times so far.)
They stand shoulder-to-shoulder, elbows knocking as they brush their teeth. After the second knock, Marlene sticks her elbow out and jabs Dorcas in the ribs making her choke out a sound, spitting out specks of white toothpaste foam onto the mirror.
They poke at each other’s bellies and chests and arms, toothbrushes abandoned in their mouths as their feet tangle and kick at each other, muffled laughter bubbling out.
Marlene relents first, leaning over the sink and spitting twice, rinsing her mouth and toothbrush. Her tongue burns lightly. She wipes the back of her hand over her mouth as Dorcas ducks down. She watches her through the mirror. Her eyes are closed and she’s tied a red silk wrap around her braids. She always brings one with her when she comes over, just in case.
Marlene’s chest aches, crack of ribs, heartbeat like an avalanche. Dorcas catches her eye in the mirror as she stands. Smiles. The knock of Marlene’s heartbeat startles and her fingertips buzz and her cheeks flush and she’s so fucking desperate for Dorcas it’s obscene.
Their hips and thighs bump, forearms brush. They use cotton pads with make up remover and swipe over their eyes, removing flakes of mascara. Use Marlene’s face wash and share the same towel to dry their faces, share moisturiser. Dorcas is swiping shea butter on her elbows and hands and forearms as Marlene swipes lip balm over her lips, and she keeps sneaking glances in the mirror at Dorcas, looking to the crack in the sink or the dust at the corners of the counter before Dorcas catches her. Before she knows. It’s written all over Marlene’s face as they share her things like it’s for the both of them. It’s intimate. She’s wrapping Dorcas up in herself, like they’re sharing skin and bones and breath. It makes her obsessive, panting and hungry and wanting.
Dorcas finishes rubbing in the moisturiser and looks at Marlene in the mirror. Her mouth is pulling down again and Marlene hates that she looks sad, scared with the crease between her brows.
“Marlene,” Dorcas says, quiet and low. “I – you know, I think.” She stops and takes a breath. Shakes her head and faces Marlene. “I think I’m a lesbian.”
Marlene blinks. “Oh.” She turns to Dorcas. “Really?”
Dorcas’s mouth curls up ever so slightly. “Yeah. I think so. Maybe. I think – I just think about everything I’ve done with men and I feel nothing – or, or I feel horrible. And then I think about falling in love and I’ve thought I’ve loved men, boyfriends I’ve had, but I can only imagine myself in love with a woman – and – and – why the fuck is that scary?” Her mouth crumples and her eyes grow wet and Marlene blisters at the sight. “I’ve always known I liked girls.”
Marlene grasps Dorcas’s wrist where it crosses over her stomach and reels her in, arms going beneath hers and holding her tight, one palm curling over her neck. They’re almost the same height. Dorcas tucks her face into Marlene’s neck and sniffs. She’s shaking. Marlene presses fingertips to the side of her neck, feels her pulse, a gunshot beneath her skin. Her other hand rubs over her upper back, over Dorcas’s wing bones and the knobs of her spine, smooths out the sharp edges of her.
“I know,” Marlene murmurs.
Dorcas chokes out a sound. She pulls back, arms still tight at Marlene’s waist. Keeps her gaze down, hands tensing and relaxing as she holds Marlene. “I feel so – fucking guilty for every boy I’ve dated. Just – how could I not know? I kept waiting for that feeling. I did love them but not like that. I kept waiting for it to feel right. Good. All I felt was safe and – and chosen, wanted, until even that faded away.”
Marlene holds her, cups her ribcage and watches the twist of her mouth, the dip of her nose bridge. “It’s not your fault. I – I mean how are you supposed to know? When the world would rather you didn’t.” Marlene feels like a wound. She says, “Women have to spend so long untangling themselves from the expectations of men. How would you know it’s an option to not want them? It’s okay. I promise, it’s okay.” Marlene uses one hand to swipe beneath her eyes, the other still holding Dorcas. Thinks about her final year of high school and how furious she was at the world and at men and how she’s still furious and how she kissed that girl at that party when she was seventeen and slapped the boy that wolf-whistled. She’s still built with grief, with the guilt of not loving men like she’s supposed to. Her mother’s grief over the life she lost, of the girl that no longer exists, sits in her bones.
Dorcas pulls back, cheeks smeared with tears, eyes red, and laughs when she sees Marlene. They reach up at the same time, wiping at each other’s cheeks, thumbs pressing beneath their eyes. Dorcas’s eyelids flutter when Marlene swipes the tender skin. Her stomach swoops.
They make their way to Marlene’s room and lie beneath the covers. Dorcas sniffs twice and places her palms to her eyes, wiping harshly. Marlene turns to her side, hand beneath the pillow, watching her. It’s dark in the room, curtains pulled shut, lamp switched off. Hazy and grey, static around the edges as Marlene’s eyes adjust to the room and centre Dorcas in her vision.
It’s quiet, quiet, and Marlene’s heart rattles out its rhythm in her ears. She feels fragile, tender, the fleshy spot beneath her ribs and the inside of her thigh and the webbing of her fingers, like she could be snuffed out with a palm, weeping-flame-fragile.
Dorcas murmurs, “Goodnight,” turning over and taking Marlene’s hand with her so she’s pressed up against Dorcas’s back, draped over her.
She swipes a finger over Dorcas’s palm. “Goodnight.”
“You know,” Dorcas whispers, “Marlene, you know I love you.”
Marlene keeps love locked tight in her mouth, doesn’t let words spill over. She loves and loves and loves and cleaves it out of her chest and her throat and her knuckles, but saying it is loss. Loving is grief, sometimes. Maybe it’s all the wanting.
“I love you too,” she murmurs, “you know.”
///
Autumn continues, weeping tree branches dry and cracking the skin at Marlene’s heels. On Thursdays, Marlene meets Dorcas at the coffee shop on the edge of campus. Usually, they sit in the warm pocket of the café in the back corner, half-studying and drinking coffee, their feet brushing against each other on the concrete floor. Usually, Marlene arrives late and messy-haired with her bag spilling out pens and loose paper, a warm double shot latte waiting for her along with a half eaten blueberry muffin after back-to-back morning lectures.
Today, Dorcas waits at the front of the shop by the door as Marlene enters. Marlene tugs her beanie off and shoves it in her jacket pocket. They’re only grabbing takeaway before heading to the library, finals approaching rapidly.
Dorcas smooths down Marlene’s hair, fingers scratching at her scalp. “There,” she says with a small smile and heads to the counter, leaving Marlene flushed, too warm and picking at the scab on the back of her palm.
She collects herself after a second and makes an involuntary noise when she reaches the counter after Dorcas. A girl with dark curly hair and freckles everywhere smiles brightly when she sees Marlene, eyes flashing down to the register and up. Flirty. Marlene remembers how she looked when she came.
“Marlene,” the girl says, “how are you? Haven’t seen you in a while.”
Marlene hums, tucking hair behind her ears then fluffing it out again. “Oh yeah. Yeah. I’m good. Studying. Um. How are you?”
“Good,” Arabella – that’s her name, thank god – replies. “Just started working here.”
“I was wondering why I hadn’t seen you here before.” There’s a strange pause. Marlene can feel Dorcas’s eyes on her where she stands waiting for her coffee. Marlene shakes her head. “Um. I’ll have a latte with an extra shot. By the way.”
Arabella blinks then smiles, cheeks going pink. “Right. Sorry. It won’t be a second.” She pauses. “And uh- it’s on me.”
Marlene fumbles with her wallet, stalling, before she slides it back into her bag. She mumbles her thanks and moves to stand beside Dorcas, knocking their shoulders together.
“Who was that?” Dorcas asks, eyeing Arabella taking orders from the growing line.
“Oh – just – this girl that I slept with a few times. Like, a few months ago,” Marlene replies. She tugs at her crew neck, throat itchy.
“Right,” Dorcas murmurs, “okay.”
It gets quiet between them, just some crooning pop song and the screech of the coffee machine frothing milk. Marlene hitches her shoulder bag up, flattens pieces of her not quite fringe. She keeps her eyes on the movement of the baristas hands, the slick-water glide from cup to steamer to grinder.
A finger skims her jaw and she doesn’t look, she doesn’t look at Dorcas, even as the finger sweeps lower and settles as a hand curled around her collar. She doesn’t look as Dorcas leans in close, warm breath blessing her ear, lips brushing her lobe. Marlene doesn’t look but she tilts her chin into it, clicks their puzzle piece jaws together, cheeks desperately close.
Dorcas murmurs, “Do you want to come back to mine tonight?” It’s loud in the café, it’s loud and Dorcas is quiet in her ear and Dorcas is pressed up against her side, soft and careful and warm. “For dinner.”
Marlene tilts her chin a little closer, nose brushing along Dorcas’s jaw. Delights in the freesia and smoke scent of her. It’s dizzying. Marlene has to close her eyes for a second just to remember to breathe. When she opens them again, she says, “You’re place is further than mine from campus.”
Dorcas smiles. Marlene sees it out of the corner of her eye and she supposes she is looking now. She can’t stop looking. Not when Dorcas pulls back so they can see each other, their faces still close. “My place isn’t actually that far,” reminds Dorcas.
“Come to mine anyway. I’m cooking tonight,” she says.
Dorcas grins. “Alright. But I’ll cook. Kikalayi. I’m not having pasta. Again.”
Marlene shrugs, grinning. She’ll never complain when Dorcas cooks Ugandan food. She talks about her mum and dad as she does, the dishes they would cook with their hands dirty, music playing: rolex and luwombo and matooke. To remember their roots, Dorcas’s mum would say, as they cooked in their south London house.
Over the noise of the café and the pressure of Dorcas’s hand at her back, fingertip brand through three layers, their coffees are called.
Dorcas collects both of them, hands one to Marlene, and throws an arm over her shoulder, dragging them out of the café. For a wild, gunshot heartbeat of a second, Marlene considers pushing up and settling her mouth against Dorcas’s, pressing her against the wall and opening her mouth and kissing her and kissing her and kissing her. It’s a blistering desire. She ignores it and allows the blister to fade out, leave a scorched-earth bruise upon her lungs.
They sip their coffees as one and walk to the library. Dorcas leaves her arm slung around Marlene’s shoulders, heavy at the back of her neck.
As they cross the square, climbing the steps of the library, Dorcas offers, “I think you can do better, honestly.”
Marlene hums, pulling out from beneath her arm, cold, cold, empty without the weight. There’s no one better than you, Marlene could say, so what’s the point, she could say.
She says, “Maybe,” and they walk inside.
///
iv. March is gut-wrenchingly hopeful, like the moment a fever breaks.
They’ve known each other for a year when Marlene tries to teach Dorcas how to drive stick shift in her beat up 2001 Honda Civic. It’s a year that curls itself on Marlene’s tongue and tastes sweet, tastes like mango cubes and lemon seeds. She lives in the year like it’s a home, like Dorcas is her home, someone she can crawl into at night and rest. It’s a year of wanting, but Marlene is used to that feeling, the wide-open road and its tyre track marks in her chest.
“No, no, oh my god! You’re hurting my car, please stop,” Marlene yells, holding the dashboard like she can soothe the angry grinding.
“This car is a piece of shit, Marlene, and I’ve been in this car when you’ve stalled it!” Dorcas retorts, voice slightly shrill.
Marlene lets out a scoff as the car comes to a jolting stop in the middle of an empty sports field car park. She exhales. “You cannot speak about her that way.” She strokes the dashboard. “She’ll hear you.”
Dorcas smacks her palms on the plastic steering wheel, head thumping on the headrest. “She is an inanimate object. She cannot hear you.”
Marlene huffs and leans against the car door, shoulder wedged against the window, smile spilling over the corners of her mouth. “Shut up.”
Dorcas shoots her a look. “Never.”
Her hair fluffs out in black curls now, just touching her shoulders. A white and black patterned bandana is tied across her hair, keeping the curls from her eyes. She’s so fucking beautiful it makes her chest hurt.
“Are we trying again?” Marlene asks, throat dry.
Dorcas groans, closing her eyes for a second, painting herself in the midday sun streaming in through the murky windows. Marlene lets herself look and look, at the strong slope of her nose, the jab of her cheekbones and wide jaw, at her full bottom lip. She’s made for light, Marlene thinks in the yellow-white heat of the car, a stained glass window kind of girl, a breath-catch-beauty kind of girl. A girl made for reverence, for being on your knees before.
Dorcas opens her eyes and Marlene just keeps looking with hot cheeks and a pull in her stomach. Her dark eyes focus on Marlene. Dorcas parts her mouth. Her voice is deeper, a bit hoarse when she murmurs, “Alright.”
They try again. The car haltingly moving forward as Dorcas increases the speed and tries to change gears and almost stalls each time. But she doesn’t. And they cheer like kids as Dorcas makes it up to third gear driving circles around the parking lot, like they’re racing down an empty highway thirty kilometres above the limit, leaving competition behind in the dust soaked afternoon. Marlene connects her phone to the aux and plays songs they’ve shared through texts and drunken late nights and shared earphones while studying, songs that aren’t just Marlene or Dorcas’s favourite songs but their favourites. Together.
Dorcas tries to sing and drive at the same time and finally stalls, and they laugh until their sides hurt, tears gathering at the corner of Marlene’s eyes. There’s something to be said about then and now and past and future and the pinkie-link of their lives but Marlene can barely breathe and the sun is sinking into dusk and she’s in the car with her best friend and it doesn’t leave space for much else but time as it stands right then, in the gasping breath from one moment to the next.
///
v. Armed with the arms of summer/ you come into my room come into my mind/and untie the river of language.
In the summer, Marlene, James, and Sirius’s lease runs out and they’re kicked out of their flat because the landlord wants to remodel the kitchen. Dorcas is looking for a new place closer to university and away from her housemate that has sex loudly at three in the morning in the bedroom beside hers. Remus joins their search because he and Sirius can’t spend a night apart without whining. Neither can James and Sirius, to be fair.
They find a rickety, sun-drenched house on the outskirts of a suburb adjacent to their university. Mostly students live in the area, and it’s sprawling with bars and cafes and bookshops. They move in early July and spend the first three weeks finding strange ornaments in local charity shops, as well as getting pissed on cheap wine and beer in their garden.
The house comprises three narrow floors with a peeling white-paint staircase, a cramped kitchen with linoleum floors and French doors that lead to the back garden. Goldfinches frequent their garden in butter-yellow evenings, balmy and sweet, picking seeds from the choppy grass and trilling. Marlene likes to sit on the grass, catching the fading sun, baking freckles into her elbows and neck, and listen to the birds. Sometimes, James joins her with a warm grin and a beer, pressing their shoulders together as they sit in the afternoon. Sometimes, Lily joins them looking like the sunset herself. James and Lily found themselves together, finally, in late spring, and move through summer with a loved-up, blissed-out look in their eyes.
Watching them sometimes hurts.
Marlene doesn’t think too much about why.
One Saturday they manage to make it out of their garden and to a club with drag queens and pounding ABBA, too many drinks into their night and feeling invincible as they live in their twenties, messy and fragile and tender in their shared house and friends that never seem to leave the living room. It will all end soon, most of them only have a year left before finishing university, and it sits as terror in Marlene’s gut, this flushed fear that they’ll all lose each other as their lives diverge.
For now, they down tequila shots and dance, spinning each other and grasping at hips. Marlene closes her eyes and the music splays a tattoo beat against her chest, lights flaring in bursts behind her lids. She is loose-limbed and dizzy in that free falling drunk way. When she opens her eyes, it’s to James dipping Lily low and kissing her softly and Remus shifting his hips from side to side awkwardly with Sirius plastered against his front like he might climb him. It makes Marlene laugh, head tilted up to the ceiling. She looks to her right and sees Dorcas dancing, hands moving over her hips and up and up her body until they’re in the air. She’s wearing a shimmery sheer top with just a black lacy bra beneath and Marlene can’t look at her for too long with all that skin just there while Dorcas laughs and smiles and kicks Marlene in the stomach with a hand to her waist.
Mary and Peter are off somewhere in the club and Dorcas has caught Marlene looking and she reels Marlene in with fingers circling her wrist, pulse point kiss, and slots them together hip to hip.
Marlene drapes her arms around Dorcas’s neck and Dorcas cups her waist and they dance. Their stomachs brush as they move their hips and their feet slot between each other and they’ve done this before, they do this every time they go out, and it drives Marlene insane. The way they can be this close and it’s still not close enough. It makes her wonder, makes her hope, but it’s never more than this.
The song changes and Dorcas draws back, holding both Marlene’s hands and they twist around, laughter thrumming beneath the music, and spin beneath each other’s arms, bumping against each other. Daring, Marlene pushes in, grasping Dorcas by the hips and moving them together in time with the beat. Her heart pounds as Dorcas slips one hand beneath the fall of Marlene’s hair and dips her chin close, their jaws knocking. Marlene can feel her breath on her neck and it’s so warm within the press of bodies and Dorcas is so, so close, shared air close, heartbeat in each other’s wrists close, lock and key close.
They’re dancing together and it’s more than usual now because Dorcas has slipped a leg between Marlene’s thighs. It’s almost friction and it makes Marlene keen, fall closer and slide her hands up Dorcas’s back, fingers tracing the matchbox notches of her spine, face pressed to her neck. She smells like her new cologne, all woodsy and masculine, and then just Dorcas: home.
“Do you want a drink?” Dorcas asks, lips pressed to her ear. Marlene nods. Her throat is dry.
They pull away from each other and Marlene needs to go to the bathroom because she’s fucking wet and deliriously turned on but Dorcas grabs her hand instead, pulling her out of the crowd towards the bar. Dorcas is served quickly. She’s tall and beautiful and has this presence that begs others to know her and tonight she has glitter on her cheekbones. Marlene keeps their hips pressed together as they lean on the bar until Dorcas grasps her hand again – two cups held in her other - and pulls them through the crowd, out to the smoker’s terrace.
She places their drinks on the railing and digs into her back pocket, pulling out cigarettes and a lighter. Without a word, Dorcas slips a cigarette between Marlene’s mouth and leans in with the lighter. The flame licks at the end and Marlene inhales, smoke burning, burning her lungs, while Dorcas holds her gaze.
Marlene is the first to pull back; heart hitting hard against her ribcage, feeling jittery, static, a radio knocked two stations too far. Dorcas smiles quickly and looks down, lighting her own cigarette that hangs like an offering from her bottom lip. Smoke spills from her mouth and Marlene finds herself mirroring her inhalations; following the blissed out nicotine-and-tobacco exhale.
“Marlene,” Dorcas says, a little loud with the crowd of people outside, the music that makes Marlene’s jaw ache inside. She looks at Marlene and her cheeks are flushed dark, cigarette hanging at her fingertips by her mouth, hair frizzing around her shoulders. The fluorescent light and the orange-flare of the cigarette carve beneath her glittery cheekbones. Dorcas hesitates. Marlene holds her breath. She says, “You didn’t bring your girlfriend.”
Marlene frowns. “My – I don’t – she’s not my girlfriend.”
There’s this girl: Maria. She’s lovely and tall with long, dark hair. She kisses slowly and fully and she likes Marlene. But she is not Dorcas and that’s all Marlene seems to remember.
Dorcas raises her eyebrows, inhales again. Tilts her chin up and away to blow the smoke. It cuts her into a figure beneath the white-green lights, a work of art. It hits Marlene in the chest and digs its fingers into the meat of her. The fluorescence makes everything seem starker, a flesh split to the bone, a first-time comedown. “She’s been over a few times though.”
Dropping the cigarette into an ashtray along the railing, she fumbles, “But that’s just – you know, I haven’t, like, introduced her to anyone. Intentionally. Sirius did kind of force an introduction. But that’s just him - I – do you want to meet her?”
“No,” Dorcas shakes her head, stubbing the cigarette on another burned out in the ashtray. “Unless – I guess, unless it’s serious. Unless you want me to.”
Marlene clenches her teeth, throat going dry, her stomach turning. She takes a breath. She feels like throwing up. Doesn’t think about why. “No –“ we aren’t serious and never will be because I’m in love with you and that takes up all the space in me, makes me think of nothing but the way your hand curls around your peach-bruise knee (you always have bruises like that. you’re careless with your own body sometimes.) and how they’d feel holding my wrists down “- I don’t think it’s like that. Just fun.”
Dorcas hums and folds her arms and leans even closer. Their thighs touch and Marlene glances at Dorcas’s lips, full and stained red from faded lipstick. Their jostled by people passing in and out of the terrace, and they keep knocking into each other, holding onto elbows and having warmth stretch between them like taffy, exchanged from Marlene’s waist to Dorcas’s stomach and back to the tender skin of Marlene’s forearm.
And then Dorcas says, she says it while their touching everywhere and brushing skin like it’s a kiss and it feels like their having a conversation about something else, and Dorcas says with what would be called scowl if she didn’t always look so fucking sweet, “So you’re just fucking then?”
Marlene takes it like a kick to the ribs or otherwise just her best friend accusing her of fucking the girl she’s seeing and making it sound like it’s dirty. Like she’s done something wrong. Marlene wants and wants and she’s choking on the red handprint of her desire and for once she’s just trying to have. She sets her jaw (sometimes she wants so much it’s like hunger. she is ravenous and wild with it, can’t move for it, and it’s like pressing on fingerprint bruises at her neck, like probing at a raw toothless gum. how pain is addictive. intoxicating. maybe she wants pain too much. maybe wanting is the pain).
She says, gristle and ash on her tongue, “Yeah. To fuck.” It’s the truth it’s a lie it’s a bloodied up set of knuckles on the ragged edge of their conversation. Marlene sways a little. Finishes her drink and aches. She wants.
“Right, cool, yeah,” Dorcas nods and pulls another cigarette out, lighting it, inhaling once, twice, before handing it to Marlene.
Marlene takes a drag. She’s still wet. “Dorcas,” she says roughly, “is something, like, fucking wrong? Are you okay? Are you mad at me?”
Dorcas laughs, sharp and barking and cut from the same feeling of the fluorescent lights buzzing over them at two in the morning: gaping and wide, a hollowed out house and loneliness and watermelon rind abandoned on summer-hot pavement.
“I’m not mad,” she says, laughter dying out around the corners of her lips. “I’m not mad,” she repeats. Throwing back the rest of her drink and dropping the cigarette, she grabs Marlene’s hand. “Let’s dance.”
Marlene resists when Dorcas tries to pull her towards the door. When Dorcas glances back, Marlene frowns. Her eyes ache and her mouth tastes like lime and chips and her ears are ringing. Her chest hurts. “Dorcas?” she finds stumbling out of her mouth.
Dorcas frowns, eyes growing wide and little shiny and she crowds close, looking sharp and soft, the way goodbye sounds coming out of her mouth (like: I’ll see you later, like: I’m thinking of you while I’m gone, like: I’m already thinking of you now). She tucks both hands beneath Marlene’s hair and pressers her fingertips to her scalp. “Hey, it’s fine. We’re fine. Are you okay?”
Marlene bites her tongue, sacrifices herself on the pinprick pain again and again and then shakes her head. She smiles. “Fine. I’m fine. Let’s dance.”
///
James finds them after that, loud and so James-like that it’s easy to forget that Marlene’s limbs feel heavy and her chest aches. They drink more and dance more and then wander home in a jumble, talking too loudly and stumbling over their feet and laughing.
James makes them all drink two glasses of water before bed in the hazy yellow light of their kitchen. When Marlene heads for her room, Dorcas follows. It’s become habit to share a bed after drinking, after all those nights where Dorcas stayed over at the old flat. They change their clothes half turned away from each other. Marlene still catches glimpses out of the corner of her eye – Dorcas’s thigh, the dip of her waist, the swell of her breasts as she tugs off her bra and slips on Marlene’s shirt.
There’s just the lamp on as they clamber into her bed, making everything muted. Dreamy. Marlene lies down, scraping hair back from forehead, fingers tangling in the knots. Her eyes are heavy. Dorcas faces her in bed. Their ankles touch beneath the blankets.
Dorcas smooths Marlene’s hair back, thumb stroking her temple. “Have fun tonight?” she whispers, voice hoarse and thick with cigarettes and sleep.
Marlene nods, nudging her head into Dorcas’s hand. “Yeah,” she whispers back and they both smile and it’s like they’ve always been, like the conversation and the dancing didn’t happen.
Dorcas tugs the hand in Marlene’s hair gently, pulling her head forward on the pillow. “Well, come over here.”
Marlene sighs, rolling her eyes. Dorcas jostles the hand in her hair, laughing quietly. She shuffles forward until she’s tucked beneath Dorcas’s chin, arms around her waist and nose buried in her neck beneath her curls. Dorcas’s hand settles on her hip where Marlene’s shirt has rucked up, exposing the waistband of her underwear. They lie tucked up against each other in the quiet. There’s the groan of pipes in the wall as someone showers, the muffled rumbling of voices on the first floor. It’s comforting. Marlene hums, tired, a little drunk still, everything cosy and warm, and shifts her leg up, hooking it over Dorcas’s hip. Dorcas’s chest pauses its rise beneath Marlene’s ear and Marlene almost shifts away, stomach sinking, but Dorcas grips her hip tight, mumbles something too low to hear right by her ear. Her breath on the skin makes Marlene shiver.
Dorcas is trailing a path along Marlene’s hip with her fingertips, the touch light and intoxicating, dipping down to trace her lower stomach then over her hip to her lower back. Her fingers follow the band of her men’s briefs. Marlene is trying not to pant, not to move or whimper or beg and beg Dorcas to touch her more. She’s coiled tight, a knot in her abdomen spreading heat throughout her limbs. Her thighs feel fuzzy. It’s dark tucked up in Dorcas’s neck, the space humid.
Dorcas’s fingers dip once beneath her briefs and Marlene shifts her hips, away and into the touch. With her leg hitched on Dorcas’s hip, she rubs against Dorcas’s thigh and it’s a delirious thrill of pressure that Marlene grits her teeth against chasing because she can’t – she can’t –
Dorcas traces her fingers up Marlene’s back and down again, fingers dipping further beneath her underwear. Marlene shifts her hips again, hot, frantic, and her hands start moving over Dorcas’s waist, up her back and gripping at her ribs, the spot just below her tits, massaging for a beat until Dorcas releases a stuttered breath and Marlene pulls her face back. She rests it on the same pillow as Dorcas. Her cheeks are warm and sweat beads on her forehead. Dorcas’s eyes are half closed, mouth parted, and she looks at Marlene and Marlene looks at her and everything is hazy, suspended, desperation cured in the mouth, a held breath and the slip of fingers deep inside, a coil that breaks and breaks and breaks and Marlene can’t do it anymore, not with both their hands everywhere, with their shirts shoved up to their armpits, stomachs exposed and pressed hot together. Not when Dorcas traces down her thigh and splays her hand underneath her thigh, fingers buried beneath the leg of her briefs and climbing higher.
Marlene releases a whiny breath and jolts her hips and Dorcas breathes, “Yeah?” and then they’re fumbling closer in the dark until they’re kissing in a heat-rush that blurs out Marlene’s thoughts.
Dorcas parts her mouth on a moan that Marlene mirrors and it’s wet, panting with tongues against each other’s lips and in each other’s mouths, hands even bolder than before. Marlene rolls her hips slowly and Dorcas presses her thigh up in time and Marlene wants to push their shirts off, press their chests and thighs together and come with all their skin touching.
She buries her fingers in Dorcas’s hair, thumbs holding at her jaw, feeling the movement of Dorcas opening her mouth for Marlene. She wants to fucking devour her, let her consume her, let her take and take whatever she wants. Marlene wants to give it. Dorcas wraps her arms tight around Marlene’s waist, pulling her on top of her so Marlene’s legs splay either side of her hips. She rests on her elbows, kissing against Dorcas’s offering mouth.
It hits her at once with Dorcas’s hand rubbing at her hip and slipping closer to between her thighs, a movement that Marlene wants to chase, that she is probably ruining everything.
The cold begins at the back of her neck and seeps down until her fingers are shaking with it. She sits up, panting, and Dorcas is lying there, splayed out with her shirt pushed to her armpits, mouth swollen and wet. She is perfect and Marlene has ruined everything. Because they’re friends, they’re friends, and what if she loses this? Shame is quick and violent in her stomach, a late night dream and the way Dorcas is watching her with dark, concerned eyes. Marlene looks at Dorcas and love blooms quick and sickening in her chest. She clambers off, falling to the bed, a hand coming to cover her mouth.
She tucks her knees to her chest as Dorcas sits up, brushing curls behind her ears that won’t stay because they never do. “Marlene?” she says.
“Fuck,” Marlene breathes out. “Fuck, I’m sorry.”
“Marlene,” Dorcas’s voice cracks out, “it’s fine – are you okay?”
“It’s just -” She inhales a shaking breath. “Have I ruined everything?”
“No, Marlene,” Dorcas replies quickly, pleading, placing a hand on her knee, squeezing. “What are you talking about?”
“I don’t know. I’m sorry.”
There’s a pause. Dorcas clears her throat. The bed shifts as she stands, arms curling around her stomach. “Why are you sorry?” she asks, her voice careful and devoid of feeling.
Marlene rolls her lips together and stares up at Dorcas in the hazy lamplight. “I don’t want to ruin our friendship.”
Because she would, her love is a cleaver to the chest each time she looks at Dorcas and it’s too much and too gruesome a love and Dorcas doesn’t want it. They’re friends and that’s what they’ve been this whole time and sometimes, sometimes, it feels like more, like something else, but it’s all in Marlene’s head. It’s just the wanting and the way she tries to cover its eyes in the dark, tries to keep its panting mouth shut.
“I don’t want to fuck this up,” she whispers.
Dorcas doesn’t reply for a heart-stopping second. Then, she says halting and wrapped up tight, “It’s okay, Marlene. I thought - You didn’t.”
She sounds sad and tired and Marlene wants to apologise again, it’s sitting bitter on the back of her tongue. But Dorcas throws her this faltering smile and brushes a curl from her eyes and turns, leaving the room. She shuts the door softly behind her.
Marlene exhales roughly, pressing the heels of her palms to her eyes, trying not to cry.
///
It takes Sirius five minutes to barge into her room with barely a knock. He pauses in the doorway with tangled hair and a wrung-out look on his face. When he sees Marlene tucked into the corner of her bed, back resting against the wall and her knees pulled to her chest, his shoulders drop.
“Hi,” Marlene whispers feebly, voice cracking.
Sirius smiles, careful and soft, always so surprisingly tender when he needs to be, and sits on the bed. “Hi.” He shuffles closer and places a hand on her knee. “Something has very clearly happened. You look terrible and Dorcas has been crying. James is currently handling that and just – what happened?”
Marlene groans, head knocking back into the wall. Her eyes tear up and she swallows glass. “We – we kissed. And fuck – it was fucking incredible. Earth-shattering and biblical and I” - she releases a shaky breath, fingers prodding at her jaw- “I feel like no matter what I do now, I’ve ruined everything.”
Sirius crosses his legs and faces her, leaning close. He smells of sweat and Remus and toothpaste and he’s looking at her with his wide, gunmetal eyes. He’s looking at her like he knows her and it makes her feel raw. She takes his hand and he squeezes once.
“You’re so fucking stupid,” he sighs, “this is truly enlightening, just, being on the other side of this.”
“What?” Marlene chokes out, throat and nose clogged and her eyes still watering. Once, when she was young, she fell over on a bitumen basketball court. She was playing tag with her brother, Cal, and she tripped on her untied shoelaces. She remembers crying and her brother walking her home, and she remembers the plaster pressed clumsily over her bloody, scraped up knee. She left it for a few days and her mum must not have cleaned it properly because one morning she woke up to a sharp, throbbing pain in her knee and pus seeping out of the wound. She thought, in her delirious, overtired state, in her scuffed bedroom with one of her closest friends holding her hand like it might make it all better, that there was some kind of metaphor in that story that applied to her now. Like, she’d left her love for too long. Like, she should have scraped herself clean earlier. Like, she is the wound and the infection and pain’s wailing cry and no one wants any of those.
Sirius flicks her ear and she squawks, laughing just a bit. He explains, “You’re so dumb. You kissed. As in, it was reciprocal?”
Marlene splutters, “I mean – yeah – it was. It went on – for a bit.”
Sirius’s eyebrows rise and he shakes his head. “So you kissed for a bit - very reciprocal - and you two are clearly obsessed with each other, as everyone is very, very aware of.”
Marlene narrows her eyes. “Stop that. It’s not the same. We’re not you and Remus or James and Lily. Not everyone gets the fucking happy ending. Your friend doesn’t always love you back.”
“Marlene,” Sirius breathes, something pained settling across his face. “You will. You get the happy ending and everything that comes with it. You deserve it. Don’t let yourself believe that it’s better not to love, not to take the chance.” Sirius exhales slowly, a rueful smile curling at his mouth. “I can tell you now it might be easier but it hurts so much more.”
“It could ruin everything. She’s my best friend.”
“Or it could be everything you’ve both wanted.” Sirius tilts his head and says, “And do you really think that if Dorcas doesn’t feel the same way she would stop being your friend? That it would change anything for her?”
Marlene lets Sirius’s hand drop and turns to face him, crossing her legs in a mirror of his position. “Isn’t that worse?” she presses. “I think I would find that worse that she could just sit there and be my friend while I’m there, in love with her, and she knows it. God, I –“
Sirius is hunched forward, elbows pressing into his thighs. His hair is limp around his jaw and dark shadows hollow out beneath his eyes. He holds Marlene’s gaze as he says, “You’re miserable now. It can’t be worse than that. The not knowing is always worse.”
Marlene sags against the wall, eyes falling closed. He’s right.
She’s so tired.
They’re sitting in silence, Marlene’s eyes half cracked, when her bedroom door is thrown open, slamming against her chest of drawers. Dorcas stands in the doorway, looking small and furious with her brows furrowed and her teeth almost bared, James standing behind her. Her shoulders are curling inwards despite her expression and Marlene aches. Everything in her wants to pull Dorcas down and press her to her chest, hold her.
Sirius stands, tugging a hand through his hair. “It’s almost four in the morning, maybe you both should just do this tomorrow.” He looks between Marlene and Dorcas.
Dorcas folds her arms. “No.”
Sirius glances at Marlene and she shakes her head, fingers tugging at the fraying edge of her shirt. Sirius sighs. James mutters, “Good lord,” and then they leave the room. Leave Dorcas pressed against the door with her arms crossed and a glasshouse scowl wavering at her mouth.
“You’re such an asshole,” Dorcas accuses. Her voice cracks and Marlene realises like a kick to the ribs and a knife wound in her side that Dorcas is almost crying, that she is biting the inside of her lip with shiny eyes and a trembling mouth. “You’re such an asshole,” she repeats, “why would you kiss me like that and tell you don’t want to ruin the friendship?”
Marlene pleads, “Because I don’t! I don’t want to ruin the friendship.” Crossing her arms over her stomach, she sits forward, holds Dorcas’s gaze. Her heart thumps in her chest, sickening. “I kissed you and you didn’t ask for that or all – all my feelings to be involved in it. It would ruin everything.”
Dorcas takes a step forward. She is so beautiful in the muted lamplight with her messy hair and her teary eyes and a t-shirt three sizes too big hanging off her frame. Want swells in Marlene’s stomach, feverish. She lets it bloom. Lets it tattoo her insides.
Dorcas says, firm, “I kissed you.”
“Well – “
“Or at least I kissed back,” Dorcas interrupts. “I don’t know who did what first because I was fucking delirious.” She laughs, slightly hysterical, looking and looking and looking at Marlene. “I was so turned on with your hand at my waist I felt like I was going to die if I didn’t finally kiss you.”
Marlene stutters, “Finally?” and Dorcas grins and there is something so sure in that moment, a swelling orchestral moment, a quiet bedroom with two girls and a confession and a kiss, wanting.
“Marlene,” Dorcas says like spring like cherries like she will keep saying it forever like hello, darling, hello. “Marlene, I kissed you because I’m in love with you and have been wanting to do it since I fucking met you.”
“Oh,” Marlene breathes, flushed.
Dorcas sits on the edge of the bed, half facing Marlene still pressed up in the corner. “You know,” she murmurs, low, and Marlene’s fingers curl into the blanket. “You’re so beautiful it hurts, sometimes.” Dorcas laughs quietly. “You look so shitty right now with half your makeup still on and your hair and I’m just- obsessed with you. I want to kiss you so much.”
Marlene, feeling brave and reckless and so hopeful it makes her fingers buzz, falls forward on her hands and knees and kisses Dorcas. Dorcas smiles into the kiss and so does Marlene, and Dorcas places a hand at the back her neck, pulling her in. Marlene sits on her lap, grasping at her jaw and neck, hands roaming. She doesn’t panic and she doesn’t pull back. She keeps kissing Dorcas, frantic and messy, because Dorcas loves her and Marlene wants and loves and it doesn’t feel like too much with Dorcas gripping her hips, holding her close.
They end up lying back, lazily kissing and moving their hips, thighs overlapping. Dorcas pulls back with a gentle nip to Marlene’s lower lip. Marlene traces down her cheekbone and presses a thumb to her bottom lip. Watches it dip, wet and bruised from kissing. Dorcas kisses her thumb and grins.
“Are you exhausted?” Dorcas whispers.
“So fucking tired,” she groans.
“Sleep, then,” Dorcas laughs. She leans to switch off the lamp, still holding Marlene close.
Darkness falls and Marlene burrows beneath Dorcas’s chin. They fall asleep holding each other.
///
In the morning, Marlene wakes to the sun bright as it spills from the curtain gaps. She wakes and Dorcas is curled into her side, kissing her neck, hand trailing up and down her stomach.
“Please tell me your awake,” Dorcas murmurs into her skin, trailing kisses across her jaw and finding her mouth.
Marlene hums, pulling Dorcas so she sprawls on top of her, all sleep-warm limbs and soft skin. “I’m awake,” she mumbles into the kiss.
“Thank god,” Dorcas breathes, stripping off her shirt. She cups Marlene’s face and Marlene lets out a noise seeing Dorcas like this, lying over her. She is acres of smooth dark skin and muscle, warm and pliant and pressing her hands beneath Marlene’s shirt, getting closer and closer to her tits.
“Okay?” Dorcas whispers and Marlene just groans, tilting her hips and chest up, pulling Dorcas in.
They kiss open-mouthed and messy for what feels like hours, losing clothing and hands curling around wrists and thighs and hips. They both have morning breath and Marlene is dizzy with a hangover but nothing else matters when they’re both naked and panting, grinding against each other’s thighs. Marlene slips her hand down Dorcas’s stomach, pressing against the frantic rise and fall of her belly for a moment before rubbing a finger across Dorcas, everything wet and hot and waiting for her. She presses two fingers to her clit and Dorcas lets out a moan, burrowing her face in Marlene’s neck. She moves slowly and holds Dorcas close as she shifts her hips in tight movements and pants out whimpers, occasionally kissing Marlene’s jaw and neck.
They kick off the blankets eventually and Marlene slips two fingers inside Dorcas, pumping steadily, watching as Dorcas grinds down and lets out these desperate little moans right by her ear.
When she comes, Marlene holds her close, runs a soothing hand up and down her back. Dorcas takes a minute to breathe and then she’s shifting down, spreading Marlene’s legs and holding them down as she places her mouth to Marlene and sucks. It begs pleasure out of Marlene and makes her cry out, arching her hips only for Dorcas to hold her down with firm hands. By the time she’s close, Marlene is propped up one elbow, one hand buried in Dorcas’s hair, begging and begging, obscene sounds escaping that she doesn’t even think about before giving to Dorcas. The way Dorcas’s eyes gleam and she ruts against the bed makes her bold. Makes her throw her head back and come loudly, uncaring of the fact they share a house with others because her orgasm is insane, sends tremors to her fingers and makes everything slow and hot and aching. Makes her want more and more and with the way Dorcas surges up and kisses her with her chin and mouth gleaming wet.
It takes them several hours to finally settle against the sheets, sweaty and sore. Marlene grins and Dorcas laughs, tangling her fingers into the rat’s nest that is Marlene’s hair.
“We need a shower,” Marlene comments.
“We need more water,” Dorcas sighs, eyeing the two empty water bottles Marlene managed to scrounge up from her backpacks after the first round.
Marlene groans, shuffling closer and throwing a leg over Dorcas’s hip. She kisses Dorcas’s cheek, and chin, and smiling mouth, tender. Dorcas’s eyelashes flutter and she skims a finger over them, feeling desperately fond. It’s a cliff-jumping, heart-stopping kind of love she feels when Dorcas opens her dark brown eyes.
“I don’t want to move. To leave this room,” she confesses into the narrow space between them.
Dorcas shakes her head against the pillow. “Neither.”
Marlene nudges their noses together and they grin, stupid and giddy. “Let’s not, then,” Marlene murmurs.
“Think we might have traumatised the gang with all the sex noises. I’m not facing them yet.”
Marlene groans, “Oh god.”
Dorcas giggles, tilting in and sliding her hand over Marlene’s thigh. “I’m sure they went out pretty quickly.”
“I hope so,” she says, “there was some pretty obscene wall-banging at one point when – well –“
Dorcas smirks and sits up slightly, placing an open-mouthed kiss to the hinge of her jaw. “What?” she breathes, “when I was fucking you with my fingers and came grinding against your thigh? Then?”
Marlene almost whimpers, leaning in to Dorcas. She nods and Dorcas grins, devilish.
Marlene groans, pushing at her shoulder. “We need sustenance and a shower before we come again. I’m going to collapse.”
Dorcas throws her head back and cackles, smacking Marlene’s thigh lightly before hopping out of bed. Marlene wobbles as she rises, cursing as her knees shake. The hallway is empty so they dash to the bathroom.
Steam fills the room as Dorcas turns the water on, testing the temperature with her fingers. Marlene watches the smooth swoop of her back and her toned arse and strong thighs. She is starving and still horny and so in love, wanting still gnawing at the bones of her. But then Dorcas glances over her shoulder, a tiny smile just for Marlene and she is electric, alight.
She scoops Dorcas close from behind, hands wrapping around her waist. “Dorcas,” she murmurs against her cheek, “you know I love you, right?”
Dorcas tilts her head onto Marlene’s shoulder, eyes and smile warm. They kiss. “I know,” she grins.
Girls like Marlene are born wanting. Now, she holds want and love and the frantic meeting of the two in her hands, in the slip of Dorcas’s waist and the crooked finger curl of her smile. She eats it out of Dorcas’s palm. She finds home in the link of their fingers. She is born wanting. She still wants. But it doesn’t fight like a hunger now that she’s allowed herself to want, to have.